Beyond the Lab: How to Get Business Units to Embrace Your Innovations

Corporate innovators often find that getting new ideas to stick in their own companies can be more challenging than in the market. Here are a few tried and true tactics to make innovation stick.

A few years back, I was lucky enough to work at a moonshot factory helping companies productize RnD and develop new product lines. While working in this fast paced and chaotic environment was exhilarating, it often ended in commercial failure for our clients. No matter how slick, innovative or closely aligned to customer needs our products were, they would invariably crash into the rocks of the reluctant leads of the corporate business units. We might be able to match a product to a market demand or unmet customer need, but rarer still was product/company fit.

Time and again you see companies championing the value of innovation without capturing the expected returns. A recent study cited 83% of companies surveyed are prioritizing innovation while only 3% meet a standard for innovation readiness. Building corporate innovation capabilities has a few factors to creating success, but the area where most incubated products and services fails is the point at which you look to graduate it to an existing business unit.

There is much more art than science in successfully transitioning those brilliant innovations into the eager (or sometimes not-so-eager) hands of business units. Running this final gauntlet can feel like navigating a maze blindfolded while juggling flaming chainsaws. But there are some key steps you can make to greatly increase your chances while still developing breakthrough products and services.

Alignment: Your North Star

First up on improving your corporate innovation success is strategic alignment. I can't stress this enough: your innovation strategy needs to deliver on the goals of the business. This would seem like an obvious point, however 52% of companies specifically cite unclear strategy as a top three challenge to innovation success. Think of it as fishing – you want to cast your line where the fish are biting, not in some business school art of the possible exercise.

Get up close and personal with those BU leads. Understand their objectives, their pain points, and where they hear demand from problems no one is serving well. Are they focusing on specific market segments? Are they trying to strengthen relationships with brokers or other intermediaries? Your job is to take these business goals and align them with clear market needs, demands, and trends.

Here is an unintuitive innovation pattern: if you start with market demands and try to retrofit them into business unit goals, you're setting yourself up for what I like to call "corporate organ rejection." It's not pretty, and recovery can be painful. Instead, focus on those clear domain areas that match the organization's ambition. This allows you to place a range of bets across your innovation portfolio while conserving precious resources on things that obviously won't stick. After all, why expend effort on areas with an Amazon Fire Phone's chance in-market of organizational adoption?

Don't forget to leverage existing channels and customer segments. If you're already working with doctors, for instance, getting into hospital networks is a natural next step. This strategy provides you with ready-made champions and a testing ground for your initial concepts. Plus, it's a great internal pitch to your BU leads when the time comes – who doesn't love the sound of increasing Customer Lifetime Value?

Data: Your Secret Weapon

Now, let's talk about the power of cold, hard facts. In the corporate world, lots of decisions are made on intuition, gut and experience. And the fuzzy world of corporate innovation is filled with great storytellers who like to fashion themselves as the next incarnation of Steve Jobs. But especially in post-ZIRP world, data will get you that coveted green light. As you're developing and testing your solutions, become a data hoarder.

Gather both qualitative and quantitative evidence like it's going out of style. Sure, at the POC or incubation stage, you probably will not have hard revenue metrics to wave around, but you can absolutely nail down those leading indicators. Be crystal clear about what they are and how they're improving or adjusting based on your implementation.

When you walk into that boardroom armed with solid data, you're not just pitching an idea – you're presenting a compelling story backed by evidence. It's the difference between saying "Trust me, this'll work!" and "Look at these trends. This is already working, and here's how we can scale it with your capabilities." Effective storytelling through data is one of the greatest skills of any successful innovator, which starts with capturing it effectively.

The Counterintuitive Ally: Shared Risk and Operational Functions

Here's a counterintuitive tip that might just save your bacon: get cozy with the shared risk and operational functions early on. I know, I know – conventional wisdom says to keep your innovation work separate from the core business to avoid bias and premature assessments, like some sort of corporate witness protection program. But here's the thing: if you keep these functions at arm's length, you're setting you’re missing a key input to convince BU leaders to take your product onboard.

Imagine this scenario: You've developed an amazing AI-enabled patient recommendation solution. It's innovative, it's sleek, it's going to revolutionize healthcare. You're ready to implement it, and then... bam! You find out the company has no way to capture and secure personally identifiable data for your solution at scale. Now try to convince a BU lead with clear margin targets to bring that into their portfolio. Cue the sad trombone.

Don't get me wrong – in the earliest stages of product innovation, you don't need to solve every operational hiccup. Until you can prove market or customer demand, these are very lower priority issues. But as you get closer to commercialization, they become critical levers in helping convince reluctant BU leads.

So, build those relationships with compliance, legal, HR, and finance. Invite representatives to monthly demos, give them a heads up on potential Capex and Opex needs. When it works well, these folks can be your problem-solving superheroes, helping you navigate the treacherous waters of implementation and scale.

Another key operational approach: don't spend lots of time trying to contort existing company solutions to support your innovation when there are some fantastic scaleups out there that can help with these operational needs. We're talking enterprise-grade solutions focused on startup and scaleup needs that are proven and reliable. Think Secureframe for automating security compliance, Deel for managing international contractor payments, or Truevalut for HIPAA-compliant data storage. Leveraging these SaaS capabilities and building deep relationship with your internal risk and operations teams, can help with the inevitable objection handling you will have to do when you are ready to graduate your innovation to a BU.

The goal isn't for these corporate functions to oversee your innovation work – that's a whole other can of worms. But by involving them early, you're preparing yourself with credible allies for the hurdles you'll face when bringing your innovation into the business unit.

Show Me the Money: The Power of Shared Investment

Lastly, let's talk cold, hard cash. If you can get the business units to put some skin in the game – actual dollars and resources – you're golden. Shared investment is like having a VIP pass in the corporate world. It shows that the BUs have a vested interest in your success, and it makes it much easier to get you access to existing customers and clients for testing and validation.

When you can move to a shared investment strategy, you're not just another cost center – you're a partner in success. It also provides you cheaper and more direct access to helping solve existing customers problems in ways that showcase value to BU leads effectively. Plus, it ensures they're invested (literally) in your success.

The Big Picture: A Delicate Dance

Remember, moving a new product or service from your incubation team to a business unit is more than just a handoff – it's a delicate dance of alignment, data, relationships, and shared investment. It requires strategic thinking, diplomatic skills, and a dash of corporate street smarts.

By focusing on these key areas – aligning with business unit goals, leveraging data and facts, building relationships with shared functions, and securing shared investments – you're setting yourself up for success. You're not just developing innovations; you're creating a pathway for those innovations to thrive within an existing organization.

Remember, every successful innovation implementation is a step towards transforming your company from the inside out. It's challenging, it's complex, but let me tell you – there's nothing quite like the thrill of seeing your work take root and flourish within a business unit. It's what makes all the late nights, the endless meetings, and the occasional corporate roadblocks worth it.